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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

In May of 1996 my InfoWorld column, then called the IS Survival Guide, introduced the technology life cycle: Hype, disillusionment, application. Several years later, Gartner introduced its highly similar “Technology Adoption Curve,” without, I’m sure, any knowledge of my prior art. Needless to say, the Gartner model is the one that’s cited incessantly in the business and IT trade press.

But am I bitter? Nah. Why would I be bitter, just because they get all the credit (and more important, revenue) for an idea I published first?

I’m not bitter, and I’m hurt you’d think I’m so small that I’d feel that way. I am, however, sore from the strain of patting myself on the back, because in what I laughingly call my spare time I’ve been adding columns to the KJR archives on www.issurvivor.com. There’s some good stuff in there, if I do say so myself — ideas that if not original were at least far ahead of their time.

Since this is the start of my ninth year writing these things, I’m in the mood for nostalgia. In that vein, here’s my personal top five list. Next week I’ll stop bragging and get back to work.

#1: The fallacy of internal customers: If I had to pick the single accomplishment of which I’m most proud, it’s the part my column has played in eliminating this sorry notion. I first mentioned the issue in a guest editorial published in InfoWorld in 1994. My opinion hasn’t changed, although it has, I hope, become a bit more sophisticated.

#2: There’s no such thing as an IT project: As far as I can tell, my first commentary along these lines appeared in 1998, and columns ever since have made the crucial point — that it’s always about changing the business or there’s no point to the effort. In the recent debate over Nicholas Carr’s Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter,” this concept assumed center stage among those of us who have replied, “Don’t be ridiculous.”

#3: Debunking bad measures: I first criticized Gartner’s TCO model, then called the “PC Cost/Benefit and Payback Analysis,” in 1993 in my first guest editorial in InfoWorld. The logic stands up well today despite a decade of Gartner’s refining the model, probably because refinement isn’t what’s needed — the model’s problems are basic and fundamental. And while Erik Brynjolfsson is the most influential critic of another example of bad measures — the so-called “productivity paradox” — I got there early (1996) and can at least claim credit as having irritated Paul Strassmann the most for my critique of his assertion in The Squandered Computer that investments in IT don’t pay off. What’s important in this debate isn’t my ongoing desire to say, “I told you so.” It’s the importance, and the difficulty of establishing well-constructed value-based measures of information technology.

#4: The fallacy of big projects: I recall reading, in the early 1990s, about a decision made by UPS to reject any project more than nine months long. I was very impressed, and started writing about “chunking” big projects into collections of small ones starting in 1996. The notion has since become mainstream, I’m delighted to say.

#5: The Value Prevention Society: The underlying idea of this satire — that it’s worthwhile preserving flexibility for end-users so they can continue finding innovative uses for their personal computers — never did catch on. Perhaps I’m tilting at windmills, but I still think locking down every desktop and preventing end-users from developing their own applications is a bad idea.

Honorable mentions go to a few other notions published early: Marketing yourself as a product (preceding Tom Peter’s notion of personal brand by at least three years); the importance of technical sophistication, along with business acumen, for a CIO (years before the CTO title was first coined); predicting the failure of the Network Computer (as soon as Larry Ellison first mentioned the idea); and the importance of IT’s figuring out how to work with the marketing department (1996, long before this became an industry discussion point).

If you’re feeling nostalgic as well, you can find the first four years of my weekly columns, along with the three Peer to Peer columns that started my publishing relationship with InfoWorld, and every Keep the Joint Running in the KJR archives on www.issurvivor.com. My New Year’s resolution is to get the rest of the archives loaded.

With luck I’ll be more successful with this than I was with last year’s resolution to use the treadmill several times each week.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

One of my clients is a newly merged company. To prepare for the engagement, I did what any self-respecting consultant would do: I called people who have been through a merger themselves.

One related this bizarre story: The leaders of one of two merging companies organized a formal “war school” to game out ways to end up in control of the new company. My source was quite angry about this, considering it unethical and subversive, not to mention sneaky.

Conducting a formal war school is certainly over the top (and made my source’s life quite difficult for a year or two as well). The underlying motivation, though, is predictable, and perhaps even laudable, the result of intense desire to beat the competition.

In the case at hand, one company’s executives considered the merger an opportunity to create a new company with enhanced capabilities and economies of scale. The executives in the other company considered it a stratagem for beating a competitor, albeit not in the marketplace. This might make them untrustworthy; it doesn’t make them unethical. “Untrustworthy” is predictive and therefore useful; “unethical” simply moralizes — a hollow luxury in the executive suite.

The odds are high you’ll go through a merger or acquisition yourself. What should you do? Let’s write some code (it’s going to look like PL/1 — it’s been a long time since I’ve written real code, I’m afraid):

IF [Your future in the merged organization is secure] OR [You’ve been guaranteed a generous severance package] THEN [Concern yourself entirely with making sure the merger succeeds] ELSE;

IF [You expect those leading the merger to reward those who help make it happen through promotions, bonuses and continued employment while making other arrangements for those who resist it] THEN [Concern yourself entirely with making sure the merger succeeds] ELSE;

[Don’t be a schmuck];

Those leading a merger are responsible for aligning the personal best interests of managers and employees with the merger’s success. What’s your role in helping the process?

Don’t ask anyone who works for you to be self-sacrificing..

IF [You want everyone working for you to help the merger succeed] THEN [Make it worth their while to do so] AND [Make sure they know it will be worth their while];

What — you expect them to be loyal to a new employer they don’t know, who shows no interest in being loyal to them?

Don’t be a schmuck.

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